Men And Women Both Prefer To Work With Men, Study Finds

CBS Local — A survey by MSN found that both men and women prefer to work with men rather than women in the workplace. The survey is believed to be as accurate as a scientific poll. Nearly 500,000 people supplied answers.

MSN found that 20 percent of men and 21 percent of women preferred to work with men, compared to just 6 percent of each men and women preferring to work with women. On top of that, 31 percent of men don’t believe gender diversity at work is “important at all” and 24 percent of women thought the same.

Still, when it comes to believing that gender diversity is “very important,” there’s a bit of a gap to bridge as 28 percent of men and 41 percent of women think that is the case.

“Workplaces were created for men,” said Katherine Zaleski, co-founder of PowerToFly, which connects female engineers to jobs at startups, via Business Insider. “Women only came into the workplace around World War II. They were handed pink slips when the men came back. Then women started reentering the workforce in the ’60s and ’70s, where women were literally paid less, penalized for having children, and had no parental leave.”

Men and women disagree on how fairly women are treated in the workplace, as 40 percent of men believe women are treated “very fairly” but only 17 percent of women feel that’s the case.

“We have a lot of folks who are undeniably biased against women and don’t think women can perform at the same levels,” said Anna Auerbach, co-CEO of Werk, which matches employers to employees seeking flexibility. “We still have a generation that was raised with a lot of stay-at-home moms. There’s no judgment there, but you wouldn’t think [gender diversity] was important unless you knew the data on how this was failing companies and was actually unfair.”

On the other side, only 20 percent of men believe that women are treated “somewhat unfairly” while 34 percent of women feel that way.

Despite how some may feel about it, research shows that companies suffer when gender diversity is not achieved as a company would be unwittingly restricting their talent pool.

“If you don’t think gender diversity is important, then you won’t have the best team you could possibly have,” said Peter Riccio, founding partner at New York-based recruitment firm Atlas Search.